Two Major Games Were Just Added To Xbox One's Playable List

Gamers fell in love with Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2, and the games were widely popular across the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Well, now you can play both games on your Xbox One. That's right, the Valve classics are now backward compatible with the Xbox One.

Engadget is reporting that both Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 have been added to the backwards compatible list for the Xbox One. These two are joined by Xbox Live Arcade titles Flashback, Brain Challenge and Babel Rising.

If you purchased Left 4 Dead 2 during the Xbox 360 and still have the disc or have it added to your Xbox Live profile, you can enjoy the game right now on your Xbox One. It's a four-player cooperative title surrounding a story of four survivors trying to escape the city while battling through hordes of the undead.

The game set itself apart from other zombie shooters by focusing very heavily on teamwork. Players were usually forced to think about what weapons and items they could carry and had to watch each other's backs while they battled through a relentless onslaught of the undead. The great graphics and atmosphere also really helped set Left 4 Dead 2 apart from other games out there where the typical goal is just to run and shoot until you get to the end of the level. The objectives sprinkled throughout made for some very intense moments. And now gamers will be able to experience that same level of intensity through backwards compatibility on the Xbox One.

Portal 2 is a much different beast, even though the game is actually a first-person title alongside Left 4 Dead 2. The major difference is that it's a puzzle game. So instead of shooting things and killing them, you create portals to solve puzzles. Portal 2 took many of the same concepts from the first game but expanded on them with a more in-depth story surrounding Chell, as well as an all new story-oriented cooperative mode where two players had to work together using extensive teamwork and tactics to get through each of the levels.

The thing that really made Portal 2 so tricky in the co-op mode was that one person had a portal gun to create entry points while the other person had a portal to create exit points. This required a lot of communication and timing, especially for the end level where mid-flight, tag-team portal creation was the only way to get to the end. Some of the puzzles were absolutely brain wrecking, but Valve really pushed the genre to its limits with that title, spawning plenty of imitators that followed thereafter in the form of games like Magnetic Cage, Colortone and Antichamber, to name but a few.

If you have already played both games and you have them in your collection, playing them on your Xbox One is as simple as plopping in the disc and downloading the games to your hard drive. If you don't own the games, it's also possible to get them off of the digital store that sells Xbox 360 backwards compatible games for the Xbox One.